Courtney Jacobs – Abstracts Art Exhibition

Artist: Courtney Jacobs of Pleasanton, CA

2013 Abtracts Art Exhibition – MyArtContest.com

My paintings represent a personal language created through the use of color, texture, composition, and action.  By pushing, scraping, dripping, and throwing the paint I create a visual history of my own response to these complex, chaotic elements.  It is an active process, intermingling various elements (line, spatter, drip, brushstroke, and squiggle) into one final composition.

As I paint I forever seek the balance between negative/positive, lost/found, light/dark, thin/thick.  For every “yin”, I search for the “yang”.  I juxtapose great sweeping gestures against calm breathing spaces.  Every splatter, gesture, and stroke is planned in terms of how it will affect the overall whole and where it can be mirrored elsewhere.  I find this harmony of seemingly contradictory visual ideas both beautiful and exciting.

It’s an intuitive process that requires as much looking as painting…perhaps more.  This intuitive process taps into the purely visual non-language right brain—a meditative unfolding I liken to “speaking in tongues.”  Also known as “glossolalia,” speaking in tongues is “the vocalizing of fluent speech-like but unintelligible utterances, often as part of a religious practice”.

For me the painting process has become a visual equivalent of glossolalia.  Instead of vocalizing “fluent unintelligible utterances,” I let the paint act as my medium of meditation.  The titles have been invented as a part of this process and are meant to be spoken aloud by the viewer.